[TALK] Re: Don't feed the Seals (MT-NW)

In news.software.readers, phe...@interpath.com (John Moreno) wrote:
>In comp.sys.mac.comm, Greg Berigan <gbe...@cse.unl.edu> wrote:
>>phe...@interpath.com (John Moreno) wrote:

Sorry for the moderation delay, but I thought this could use appearance in
rec.arts.ascii.  I like to send all my new ASCII artwork there.  Since
you're in the c.s.mac.comm group, I've dropped the c.s.m.apps group. 
Restoring some context for rec.arts.ascii's benefit.

:::          _-<#)-=# http://incolor.inetnebr.com/wotw/ (War of the Worlds)
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:::  \_--=____#)    Richard Hart and Justin Gunn at C|NET, this means you too.
:::
>>> He likes the war of the worlds ascii art - puts him one over the limit

>> Well if I could have found a way to keep it within 4 lines I would have
>> done it when I created the ASCII-art.  Yeah, I created it myself.  I am
>> trying to come up with an alternative that would keep me within the limit
>> (which I've always agreed with) but it is difficult.

> Frankly, I'd rather you added another line and made it look better (if
> you can)

I'd have to add more than one line.  It's difficult to maintain the
teardrop shape on the underside while still showing the front edge seam,
at least with standard ASCII.  I'm not going to throw MIME types on all my
messages just to get access to better line drawing characters.  (I've seen
neat faces made with acute and grave accented o's and inverted question
marks.)

> or get rid of it entirely, because as it is it simply looks
> like line noise.  The only thing worse than ascii art in the sig, is
> incomprehensible ascii art in the sig.

Yeah, I've gotten that before regarding the half-side view.  That drawing
was based upon one (mirrored) view of the War Machines which is also
visible on the web page.  (I thought people would visit the page, see the
graphics there, and that would clue them into what the ASCII art was
about.)

Anyway, I'm trying out a new one now.  I'm going to miss the extra line of
quotage.  It just seems the beam arm is too short and I'm not all that
happy with the racing stripes.  It may have ended up a bit wide.  I wanted
to do the tripod refit but that would have been at least 6 lines.

Is there a leniency for software which insists on sending an extra newline
at the end of the post before submission which could cause a signature to
have a fifth, empty line?  Some could do this by ending all posts with
"\n.\n" to make the last line of the post ended with a newline character,
or must they check for this boundary condition?

>> And I'm not using MT-NW 2.4.x yet because, well, I haven't gotten around
>> to installing it yet, and because of some problems with the news server
>> administration here (not of a technical, "incompatibilitization" nature,
>> more like it wasn't propogating articles off the server).

> Well, I'm currently giving airnews a 30 day trial because of problems
> with my isp's news server - although so far it isn't doing so good (it
> keeps loosing the article count so that I end up downloading already
> read headers - and the expire after ~20 days).

Yeah, keep those article counts tied up; don't let them run free to drop
their packets on the neighbor's LAN.[1] :-) 

It also apparently generates monster message IDs like
<361...@library-proxy.airnews.net>
and
<DA8...@library-proxy.airnews.net>. 
78 characters from < to > inclusive.  I think less should be worried about
trimming the References and more attention should be given to excessively
large IDs.  It wouldn't be so bad if the left size wasn't three
hexidecimal encodings of unknown content.  The NewsWatchers at least use
<username-DDMMYYHHMMSSCCCC@FQ.D.N> (though they do show a lack of
addressing Y2K by only encoding two digits of the year, now under 2 years
away).

I'm dealing here with two servers: one which hasn't had any mainstream
groups added for a year (still carries the Big 7, no humanitites.*) and a
server which appears to be a full Big 8 feed but with some groups not
getting their feed (the affected groups and the fact that status hasn't
changed after informing them makes me think it is another deliberate act
of censorship) though the primary feed for the new groups does have
traffic.

I'm looking into porting dnntp over to the Mac so that I can merge the
local UNL feed with an open distant full-feed.  Can't run it on my UNL
account; there are time limits for background processes.

Anyway, I'm still concerned about whether MT-NW gets a seal or not in
light of how many connections it can open at once.

[1] "If your use of lose and loose is loose you lose."

-- 
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